“What’s the matter with you?” I’m fierce with him.
I don’t say any more, though. If he wants to bring trouble on himself, he can. I’m not sharing it with him.
“That old man, that Papa Mavuso? He know how Faceman and the other big men beat his boys? How they say no eating, no sleeping because we don’t dig enough? Last shift, Faceman, he beat us, me and Aires, and he take the water I have to drink –”
Taiba must be crazy talking and talking like this. Faceman is already here, standing over us.
I don’t know why they call him Faceman. We can never see his face properly. The lamp he wears shining from his forehead is bigger and brighter than any of ours. It puts his face, and especially the eyes, in shadow. If I make the mistake of looking up at him, all I see is the wet shine of his bottom lip, maybe a gleam from his teeth if he’s talking. Not smiling. Never smiling. Sometimes there’s a flicker of something where the eyes are, and then you know you’ve looked too long.
I keep my head down. Keep working at the rock. The muscles in my shoulders and back are on fire, but that fire is nothing next to the heat pressing in on us from all around. It’s the earth’s inner heat, too hot for humans. We shouldn’t be here.
Words are still coming out of Taiba, like it’s an illness he has suddenly got.
I send him a sideways look. I don’t know why. I don’t care about him. It could be that I want to see if the madness shows or if he still looks the same.
Not the same as before we came down here. That shining roundness of his face has no business in this place of boiling shadow that is only ever lit with the fever-glow of our lamps or the lighting the men sometimes rig up in the main tunnels.
Taiba’s mine-face is now the same as all the others: hollowed out and hungry.
He still smiles, though. I don’t understand that. I think his brain must be damaged or something.
I can’t see if he’s smiling now, because he’s looking at Faceman.
The thing I do see is that Taiba hasn’t been working close to Aires like he usually is.
That’s when I understand what he’s trying to do. He doesn’t want Faceman’s attention to fall on Aires, because if he sees how badly Aires is working, Faceman will give him another beating for sure. It won’t matter that the reason Aires can’t work properly now is because of the savage way he beat up both boys last shift. Aires is smaller than all the other boys anyway. I don’t think Aires will be coming underground a second time. He’ll stay down here this time unless someone troubles to take his corpse up.
I suppose Taiba might try.
I’ll always be one of the foreign fools, so I’ll never rise to have Faceman’s power, but if I survive long enough I could be like Moreira and Juvenal. Then I’ll remember that a bad beating will only make a slow worker even slower. I don’t understand why Faceman doesn’t get that.
As it is, I didn’t expect Aires to last this long. He wouldn’t have, if Taiba wasn’t helping him. I think it is about three months now that we’ve been down here, but it’s hard to be sure with no real day or night, just our shifts and rest times, every one the same as the one before. I heard one of the local men say it’s about four weeks since the shoot-out.
It must be nearly time to go up. One time, when I was in the other mine, Papa Mavuso didn’t have us brought out for six months, but usually we’re inside the earth for three or four.
It could happen that Taiba Nhaca is the first corpse we get from this time underground.
Something in my chest gives a big jump. Taiba isn’t even pretending to work, and he’s still talking. Talking directly to Faceman. No one does that.
“You want to beat me?” He is challenging him. “That Papa Mavuso –”
Faceman makes a sound that’s like roaring, and he’s charging at Taiba now, the way an angry kraal dog will go for another that’s come sniffing around its territory.
I have a moment of wanting to be deaf and blind, wanting the dense darkness of our rest times, which I mostly hate, so I don’t have to see.
“Mavuso! Don’t speak to me about that stupid old man. Useless foreign boys he send us.”
I have to look, even if I don’t want to. Faceman has grabbed Taiba with one hand, and the other is a fist, pumping like a machine, driving into Taiba faster than the angry words. If he wasn’t holding Taiba up to hit him, the kid would have fallen after the first punch.
“Spike Maphosa, he is going to come, make you to stop, you Faceman.” Taiba is panting, and grunting with every blow, so that he can hardly get the words out, but still he keeps on with his talking, true crazy talk now. “Spike Maphosa, he is saving the boys in this mine, and all the other boys –”
“I’ll cut your tongue out of your dirty foreign mouth. Inja!”
Faceman is blown up with the worst rage I’ve ever seen in him, banging Taiba back against the rock wall he was supposed to be working, and back again, and I think I’m going to see a person killed in front of my eyes. They say Faceman killed Januario in the other mine, but I was sent down a different tunnel that day so I didn’t see it.
“Spike . . .” It’s a thread of whistling sound from Taiba now, because he must be nearly unconscious.
“No person! No person!” Faceman is screaming, and I can hear he’s wanting to fall into siSwati except that he wants Taiba to understand. “Inja! No Spike. Thula!”
I don’t believe in Spike Maphosa either, and the thought comes to me that some day my disbelieving might be as hard and angry as Faceman’s and I’ll be screaming like he is. I won’t hit the boys, though.
I don’t know why it makes us angry to hear talk of Spike Maphosa.
It’s the first time I’ve thought that Faceman and I are alike. It’s not a good thought.
Now Faceman lets Taiba fall in a heap, and I quickly turn my eyes away as he swings round, but I’m too late. He’s noticed me.
So now it’s my turn because I’m in charge of these recruits. I’m supposed to keep them working – as Faceman reminds me, and for me the abuse all comes in siSwati. The South African kind. Sometimes I hear Mahlori and Takunda mocking the way we Swazis speak it.
I’m being thrashed and all the time I’m wondering how the boys can respect me and listen to me when they keep seeing this being done to me?
Hate fills my head, pounding from the inside to match the pounding of Faceman’s fists. I try to push it out. Hating is another kind of weakness because it stops you focusing on your work if you’re thinking about how much you hate.
It would be different if there was a chance of doing something with the hatred – taking revenge or changing things down here.
But there isn’t. No chance at all. Everything will always be the same. We’ll be down here, and we’ll go up, and then we’ll be down here again. It’s my life. I’ve chosen it. When I was a stolen zama zama recruit like Taiba and the others, I didn’t have a choice. Now I do.
So hating is pointless, whether I’m hating Faceman or Taiba. Taiba has brought this beating on me, but catching myself hating him, I get a fright. He is probably dead from Faceman’s blows, and hating the dead . . . things could turn bad for me. Four years, and I’ve had more escapes, more luck, than a lot of others. I mustn’t do anything to change that.
“Work! You work, you make the other boys work.” Faceman must be starting to get tired because now there are longer pauses between his blows. “You think I’m a fool? You think I don’t know how useless these lazy dogs are? I was a boy in a mine like this, so I know. The others were cowards. I did all the work.”
Then it’s over and he has moved off. It’s the first time he has ever said anything about himself. It’s strange to think of him as a boy. I can’t imagine anyone ever picking on him and beating him. Or maybe they did and that’s why he’s like he is now. But that would mean boys like Taiba or Aires could also grow up to be brutal bullies, and I can’t see it. I can’t see Aires growing up, full stop.
Faceman is shouting again, at Moreira an
d Juvenal first, and then at Mahlori and all the other South Africans. He’s always angry, that man.
It troubles me when people make noise underground. These rock tunnels have their own sounds, the creaks and groans as troubling as explosions or the roar of rockfall. I imagine men’s noise competing against the earth’s voice, and the earth resenting it, and shifting to punish us.
“Sebentani! Work!” I say to the recruits, although all through Taiba’s beating and then mine they’ve been too scared to stop and have kept at it.
I don’t know where Taiba’s lamp is. Maybe it broke. Mine shows me his body lying in a heap. I remember when I came out of the tunnel and saw Januario’s body like that, only making a bigger heap because he was eighteen. Some of the men pushed or kicked it in passing, booted feet and even bare.
I won’t do that.
Then I hear Taiba groan.
I leave him lying there until our shift ends. Occasionally he groans or whimpers. The men take no notice, even when the shift is over.
I wasn’t planning to do anything, but because of nothing I can understand, I say to Aires, “Help your friend.”
Then I remember he doesn’t understand English, so I pull Taiba up and throw him over my shoulder. I carry him to our resting place. He makes a long wavering sound, a cry full of pain. So he’s still alive.
And I’m the crazy one now.
“Give him your water,” I tell Aires as I let Taiba down among the mess of empty food tins and bits of clothing we were wearing the day we came down.
Aires doesn’t even understand I’m talking to him, so I take his bottle as he’s lifting it to his mouth. I’m not sharing mine. That’s taking madness too far.
Aires doesn’t even seem surprised. I suppose he has grown used to being abused, even with Taiba looking out for him. He won’t last long. If Taiba makes it, he won’t be fit for anything except surviving.
“Fix yourself.” I speak to Taiba in my roughest voice so he knows he’s not going to get anything more from me. “Or tell Aires how to do it.”
I turn away and switch off my lamp. For a long time I sit on the rock floor with my knees pulled up. I wouldn’t call it thinking, what I’m doing. It’s more like letting my mind wander around, over and through everything that has happened in the last few hours.
I lie down. After a time I hear Taiba and Aires murmuring together in their language. Taiba’s voice has a fine, hurting sound. I think he must be telling Aires what to do to help him. I wonder if he will be fit to work again. It will be bad for him if he isn’t. Bad for Aires too.
A long time later when I’m stinking and sweating, sunk in the listening mine-sleep, watching leering monster-faces and rockfalls chasing each other across the inside of my eyelids, someone says my name.
“Regile?”
Taiba’s voice has slowed right down now, slurring, maybe because of broken teeth. It comes from so close, I know he must have shifted nearer to me. No one else is talking. One boy snores. He is lucky to be able to sleep like that. I open my eyes. There is only darkness.
“What?” I’m harsh.
“Sorry, my brother.” I can hear it’s difficult for him to speak.
“What?”
“Sorry. Me, I do it. Make Faceman to hit you.” His breath wheezes in and out of his chest, making me think of my mother and my youngest sister when they have the attacks the doctor said were asthma.
I feel angry with Taiba. I don’t want to remember things from home, not bad things like the asthma or good things like how when I first took money home it paid for the doctor and their new asthma pumps.
“Shut up,” I tell him.
“I must talk at Faceman, please to understand.” He doesn’t listen to me. “Aires, he can’t work –”
“I know why you did it.” I break into his story. “You’re crazy. Mad. Now, phumula! Rest. Or you can’t work the next shift and then there’s big trouble.”
“My light . . . lamp.” He takes a whistling, bubbling breath. “It is broke.”
“Tomorrow you and Aires can work close, with just one lamp. Then we’ll tell that man who brings food for you boys. Papa Mavuso will send a new lamp.”
“No. No.” It always sounds like “nor” when Taiba says no. “This is my idea I have, Regile. Aires, we hide him. These small-small places? Take food for him. I take his lamp. I work. Faceman says where is the other one? We say he died, the beating was too hard. Faceman, he won’t know, is it me or Aires working. Same-same for him. Then it’s time we go back, up to Papa Mavuso, we take Aires. And Spike Maphosa, he come get us.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Please, my brother Regile, listen me. Aires, he is not strong. The work, he cannot do it. I do it. I can. Even now. Me, I am strong.” He has to stop and take big breaths and swallow twice, a clicking sound. “Always at home Aires, he is with me. He follows me. So the first man, when he says he has work, I say nothing. And Aires, me and Aires, come for the work.”
“So Aires is a stupid boy, following you like that,” I say, and I’m thinking that if one of them can survive, it’s Taiba, but only if he dumps Aires – stops trying to save him. “And you’re stupid, taking such a beating from Faceman.”
“Aires, he is my friend from home. Since long time.”
This is another strange thing about Taiba, the same as the smiling is strange. When zama zama boys’ bodies get broken, by beatings or in accidents, something inside them gets broken too. You can always tell. Taiba is different. Maybe it’s because whatever is inside him is different. It must be, the way he is still thinking about helping Aires, and still believing in Spike Maphosa.
“You’re insane,” I say because it’s easier to believe that than to wonder about what keeps him the way I was before my first few weeks underground. “Do what you like. Hide Aires, anything. Just don’t tell me about it. Don’t tell me where he is. If I don’t know, then I can’t tell the men anything if they come asking questions.”
That’s the most I’ll do for this lunatic, and I’m probably being a fool, as crazy as he is.
Chapter 3
If Taiba has hidden Aires, it’s working.
I don’t know anything for sure, only that Aires isn’t here with us any longer. I’m careful not to ask Taiba anything, and for once he has listened to me and doesn’t tell me anything either.
It may help that Faceman hasn’t come back. That’s his pattern. He’ll come two or three days in a row, and then he stays away. I don’t know if he’s in another part of the mine or in another mine altogether. He could be up on the surface, overseeing the men up there who do some of the processing secretly in the night, Papa Mavuso told me – crushing rock and mixing it with water and mercury, I think.
The other men don’t notice things the way Faceman does. They probably don’t even know how many boys there were to start with.
How Taiba did it, how he hid Aires, if he helped him or just told him where to go, is something else I don’t know. It must have happened during that first rest period after his beating, when he was so sore. After I told Taiba I didn’t want to know anything, I could hear the two of them talking quietly, and then silence. I thought they were sleeping.
Then it was our shift again. Aires wasn’t there, and Taiba had a lamp. When I saw his face under its light, I thought its big, shining roundness had come back. Then I realised I was seeing the swelling from his beating. It wasn’t just his face. When he moved, he looked as badly crippled as Papa Mavuso’s daughter, who can’t walk without her two sticks.
He couldn’t do any good work, chipping or loading. I should have shouted at him, pushed him around, but I just pretended not to notice. I decided he’d stay useless longer if I drove him too soon.
He’s so into believing in things – that everything will work out fine in the end, for one – and maybe all that positive thinking worked, because only Juvenal came near us after we’d been sent back to work in the same place as our previous shift.
He could see Taiba
was struggling. He said something rough in their language, but he didn’t hit him or anything.
Maybe it was because he was also once a boy zama zama stolen from Mozambique. I don’t know. The men never tell us boys anything about themselves. It could be that Juvenal didn’t hit Taiba because he too has suffered beatings from Faceman, or it could just have been because Taiba is someone from home. That would be wrong, but lucky for Taiba.
I don’t go easy on the Swazi boys. Swazi, Mozambican, the Zim, they’re all the same to me.
If Aires is hidden somewhere, and still alive, Taiba must be taking him food and water whenever it is delivered. I don’t see anything and I try not to hear.
He doesn’t stay with Aires in our rest times. I’m guessing the hiding place is too small, a cleft or a clear pocket in the rubble of a collapsed tunnel.
Maybe Taiba is lonely, because now he tries talking to me.
Always the same thing. “Regile, my brother? Spike Maphosa? His story, how it goes?”
Mostly that question makes me feel impatient and I just tell him to shut up, but this rest time something makes me ask, “Why do you want to know? How can you keep believing in him?”
“Me, I must,” Taiba says in that obstinate way I’ve come to expect. But his answer makes no sense to me. “He will help, I think.”
“Stupid wishing.” His confidence makes me uncomfortable.
“You say.” It’s not unfriendly, but the firm way he says it tells me he doesn’t agree. “Thinking about Spike, it make me strong. To know more about him, I need it . . . for my thinking.”
Spike. Like he’s talking about someone he knows. A friend.
I suppose he needs the extra strength. He’s still slow and sore from the beating, and if he is hiding Aires, it’s a dangerous thing to be doing. As if we aren’t facing enough dangers here, forcing the angry earth to give us its gold. It must tear at his nerves.
I suppose it’s understanding this that stops me telling him to shut up and let me rest.
Dreaming of Light Page 2